Whitepaper: Downtime costs how much? Calculating the business value of disaster recovery

As an IT professional, you will experience a system failure, outage, or complete site disaster. It’s inevitable, and your organisation probably already has some sort of disaster recovery (DR) plan in place.

Most days, you probably don’t even think about DR. You focus on projects that streamline processes, decrease costs and give you some good visibility. DR is rarely considered strategic to the business. But when that disaster happens and you need to quickly restore your company’s data and IT services, an ineffective DR plan can pose a serious threat to the company as a whole. And for you, it can mean the difference between being seen as a hero to the C-suite, or finding yourself in a job interview somewhere else.

Take, for instance, the Orleans Parish in New Orleans. As you can probably imagine given the location in an area prone to natural disasters, a DR plan was rightfully in place. However, when two servers that held the parish’s conveyance and mortgage records dating back to the 1980s crashed simultaneously, their DR plan came up short.

The Times-Picayune newspaper reported on the incident, saying that, “Without a complete and verified database of both conveyance and mortgage records, title companies can’t be sure that a person trying to sell a property truly owns it free and clear. And the mortgage record database, which is separate from the one for conveyance records, is still missing about 100,000 documents.